So when the author states that "Microsoft just acquired OpenAI for $0" they mean, effectively, only a fixed-time snapshot of code that is likely old news in about 18 months by the time other models have caught up. Microsoft still needs to execute like mad to make this work out for them. Right now the entire thing seems to rest on the hope that enough talent bleeds out of OpenAI to make this worthwhile. They'll probably get that. But it's still a delicate game. I most wonder what breakthrough Ilya has been alluding to recently [1] and whether it'll be available under MSFT's license.
Plenty of them can go to Google, Anthropic, Apple, Tesla, Amazon or any other attractive company to work for. By attractive I mean they'd be compensated well enough to have a nice life there.
There's not a lot to suggest everyone will jut join M$ by default.
Development work on GPT5, curated input datasets, human feedback data, archives of all ChatGPT conversations, DALL-E, stats on which users are the big spenders, contracts with cheap labor to generate data and moderate abuse...
[1] https://youtu.be/Ft0gTO2K85A?si=YaawmLi8zKrFxwue&t=2303